


Loved the Stars Too Fondly

by partingxshot



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Gen, Space Opera
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 07:49:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/partingxshot/pseuds/partingxshot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Or: The adventures of Captain Harley of the Earth Special Spatial Regiment and her companion, Ms. Maryam the tailor/smuggler extraordinaire, being also a tale of two robots and their unexpected development of sentience.)</p><p>Action! Romance! Space! Alien fashion! Anti-determinism! Robot angst! Space!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HanaMayhem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HanaMayhem/gifts).



> Warnings for mentions of character death (off-screen/in the past) and some serious existential robo-angst.
> 
> Written based on two lovely prompts asking for Jade/Kanaya space adventures and Jadebot/Aradiabot, this certainly got away from me and took up a lot more of my time than I was intending it to! Hopefully at least some of it matches what my requester was looking for; it's a bit more rushed than I would have hoped but I'm just kind of terrible in that regard.
> 
> Now I did the best I could in terms of the basics, but take this as sci-fi by and for the science fictionally challenged. Come on, the canon includes asteroids that maintain a breathable atmosphere and are also called meteors for some reason, what do you want me to do? And when it comes to the robots, just...go with it. It's what I've got. All resemblance to the single episode of Firefly I've seen in my life is mostly coincidental.
> 
> Theme song is "I Prefer the Sky" by the Queenstons and I don't even regret telling you that.

“You certainly spend a good deal of your time fussing over trivial matters, particularly for one who claims such intense intellectual superiority.”

“A loose button is in no way trivial.” She skillfully pulls the needle in and out, the thread looping up against itself to hold the carved marble stone close to the girl’s embroidered vest. “And either way I don’t really see how these two categories of interest have to be mutually exclusive.”

The subject of her attention makes a noncommittal sound, lips pressed gently together. “Then please, do me the honor of explaining the cerebral intricacies of button-sewing.”

She pulls the thread taut, knotting it delicately behind the button’s gleaming surface. “I’ve always been of the opinion that clothing holds power.”

“Oh?”

“Absolutely. It conveys status, whether or imagined or genuine, and invites the universe to make assumptions about your worldview.” She pulls herself off her knees to the balls of her feet, smoothing down the vest at the girl’s hip bones. “And to introduce fashion to some far-off colony is to introduce society, commerce, a common culture…because of course though the designs may be originally from some central place of power they will slowly change to suit the convenience and whims of the local inhabitants, stressing their own independence and separate goals and achievements. Not that this would be the only dividing factor, of course, but in some cases –”

The girl cups Kanaya’s chin in her hands, pulling her gaze gently upwards until their eyes meet. She smiles, lips still decidedly closed, and Kanaya grins sheepishly back.

“So talkative, Ms. Maryam.”

Kanaya stands and wraps one arm around the violet-clad waist, feeling lace trim press up against her calloused fingers.

Later on she surprises herself by forgetting whether or not they were dancing when white light screamed through the windows and the world went to sound.

 

Ms. Kanaya Maryam refers to herself as a tailor, though the term is in most ways misleading. She creates custom clothing and does alterations on the side, attracting the business of mostly the rich and famous (rich and _victorious_ ) of Alternia: those who can afford to spend precious hours thinking about color combinations and the imposing flare of their capes. However, given the deplorable state of fashion on the home world and its surrounding tributaries, even this isn't enough to support her and her scandalous appetite for rare books of paranormal lore. So she engages in the occasional extrasolar trading venture, selling cutting-edge fabric samplers and avant-garde designs beyond the reaches of the troll empire.

At the very least, this is what her travel papers imply.

Currently she is surrounded by trunks’ worth of wares, piled upon one another in ridiculous leaning towers that are meant to take up as little space in the terminal as possible but really only succeed in making other cramped hopefuls look even more nervous than they already were. She wears her own patented Ring Boots (designed for comfortable travel on any terrain!) and a full green bustle in back that opens to sleek practical leggings in the front, where she clutches her mesh handbag too tightly.

The civilian-access terminal, small and overcrowded but meticulously white-clean, is populated by a handful of small ships, mostly scouts and traders. Some are guarded by a troll dressed for travel, clipboard in hand and hawking destinations like storefront goodies, while others are left unattended. Beyond the tall steel doors to the right, the space corps reserves lie in wait.

The glances of her fellow travelers are quick and hungry, taking in the sleek forms of empty ships as they shove past each other to peruse them. They size up sharp-toothed captains warily, measuring the risk as their hands tighten on their trunks, likely as not containing material that would prove to be embarrassing upon inspection: state-of-the-art Alternian weaponry, or perhaps illicit sopor for the interplanetary market.

No one claimed the _business_ of the terminal was as clean as the walls.

Kanaya adjusts the feather on her hat, because the damn thing hasn’t sat right since the dust storm yesterday and also she desperately needs something to do with her hands right now. She needs the rumors to be true. It’s today or never again, and she can’t afford –

“Skaia system!”

Her vascular organ leaps into her throat.

“Skaia system, right here! We go straight to Prospit, no stops, full stop!” The voice, bright and brave and sent from heaven, rings into her like a full bell choir.

She breathes again, relief smacking her into motion, and pushes forward through the crowd to see the captain. “Oh, that’s very good, I –”

She notices the dark, charged tone of the trolls’ mutterings, the way they draw back from the two of them, around the same time she sees the captain.

“Hi!” the young woman says, bright and brave and sent from _somewhere,_ and Kanaya says “hello” like she’s crash landed from some nonsense asteroid where that is an even minimally proper reaction.

“I’m Captain Jade Harley of the Earth Special Spatial Regiment, and I am at your service!” She pulls a floppy-wristed salute, and Kanaya manages to shut her mouth before “but you’re a _human!_ ” spews all over the girl and her lurid lime uniform. “Name please,” she says, cheerfully shoving a clipboard up at Kanaya’s face.

 

Captain Jade Harley of the Earth Special Spatial Regiment is as foreign as she is chipper. She breezes through customs like someone who has the right to, and treats incredulous troll officials as if they were human (she certainly does not act as if she were a troll). She wears her long, human-flaccid hair down and hastily-combed, and it sticks and flips around her uniform like a flattened but affectionate long-haired mountain bovine. Kanaya mostly follows behind her in bewilderment, helping to move her own overflowing luggage into the ship (a scout: small, white, and pointed, with “E.S.S. Space Crevice” emblazoned in proud shining gold on the side. Kanaya has to look twice).

Once they’re aboard and Kanaya’s handed over the first half of her transport fee, Captain Harley insists on a tour, though there isn’t much to see on such a small vessel. A cockpit, the living quarters (bunkbeds, Harley explains with excitement), the storage bay, and the gun deck, which besides holding the compact laser station for rear fire seems to serve as the armory. The variety of weaponry is astounding, clean, and a little bit unnerving.

“And…this is a scouting ship?” she asks, peering at the well-worn laser controls.

Captain Harley idly twists the chair back and forth. Well-oiled. “Yep! Though I do a lot of work around the Skaia system, so sometimes…well, you know how it is right now. From what I hear there hasn’t even been a ship between there and Alternia in awhile now.”

Kanaya knows very well; she’s calculated the risk of travel time and again, and were she to tell Harley everything she would never be able to stress enough how desperate she had been to find someone, _anyone_ bound for Skaia.

“And I’m stationed so far from Earth that I tend to be a bit…freelance…Oh, but don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe, Ms. Maryam!” She looks up earnestly through slightly clouded glasses and Kanaya feels the urge to take a rag to the lenses. “I take on passengers all the time. ‘Specially now that I’m down a travel partner; it gets kind of lonely sometimes.”

“Why is that?” she asks bluntly, following the captain up the ladder to the dim central passageway.

“Why is it lonely?” Harley looks back over her shoulder in surprise, and her mess of hair sways with her.

“Oh, no, I meant…why are you missing a partner? Not that I’m…mistrustful of your capabilities as a leader, I’m sure you are… _were_ fantastic – ”

Harley laughs, an abrupt, barking sound that doesn’t suit her gullible smile. “Don’t worry about offending me, I wasn’t even the leader, technically! My brother and I were partners.” She swings herself back into the cockpit, and Kanaya stoops to follow. “But he decided to go pirate,” she says with a rough sigh, blowing her bangs away from her eyes.

“What, just like that?” Kanaya feels herself becoming intrusive (a terrible habit of hers) but Harley seems to welcome it.

“Yep! Said he couldn’t do any more good on this little clunker than he could being ‘Captain Hook with lasers.’ But between you and me,” she says frankly, plopping down in the pilot’s chair, “I think it had a lot to do with a very pretty pirate lady he met outside Lolar.” She pats the copilot’s seat in invitation, and Kanaya sits down, grateful for the rest. Harley surveys her with open curiosity now, eyes sweeping across her fashionable clothes and taking in the shape of her horns. Kanaya shifts in her seat, uncomfortably certain that humans don’t really understand what could constitute flirting in troll culture. The captain’s eyes are green, dimmer than her own but with a more intriguing shape to them than most of the humans she’s seen before, mainly in news bulletins or on the streets of Prospit (or in a cathedral, a long time ago and far away).

“Captain Harley, if you pardon my curiosity,” she starts hesitantly.

“I do.”

“What are you doing so far from…I realize Earth is politically neutral in the Skaian war –”

“Like I said,” she shrugs, “I can get away with freelance, even if no one wants to get involved militarily.” She flicks a few switches, and a faint vibration runs through the metallic floor. Kanaya can’t quite wrap her head around how openly the woman implies a disregard for her planet and its diplomacy, to a total stranger, no less.

“And…you can afford to interact freely with Alternians? I may be behind on my politics but I’ve head our respective governments are not on the best of terms.”

Harley moves a few more levers and presses some buttons, and Kanaya feels an engine thrumming to life as belts suddenly snake around her, pulling her tight to her seat. “I was visiting an old friend,” she says cheerfully, raising her voice over the sound, though her pink human lips tug into a mischievous expression. Familiarity jolts Kanaya with as much strength as the sudden roar of the rockets (humans and their mysteries, soft and gloating).

“And here we gooooooooo!” The captain pushes a lever forward with all the drama of an action film. Kanaya’s stomach drops away as they climb, the small vessel shuddering with the force of it. With an alarming knocking sound the left wing bumps against the high opening roof, and Harley laughs as they spin twenty degrees to the north. “Pchooooo!”

Kanaya grips her armrest tightly. “Your brother wasn’t, by any chance, the pilot?” she shouts.

“How did you know?” Harley replies, grinning full-toothed like adventure incarnate.

 

She comes right on time, as always.

Jadebot is halfway between point a and point b on her transport route; the city’s golden gleam is stronger in the glow of her high beams but dark around the edges, golden spires inserting themselves into her vision above the gold-paved streets. Something ungolden _pings_ against her sensors and she darts off the golden main road, straining every function to search for a familiar, ungolden pulse.

The foreign body moves quickly and furtively, building to golden building, and Jadebot turns down her own ocular lights to minimum, so that no one is exposed against her will.

She comes once every eleven nights this time of year, and she is very pretty. Her chrome body is impractical for hiding, because everything that surrounds her is shinier (golden) and because her rockets are old and emit a quiet rumble as she speeds through the streets. Jadebot doesn’t think she’s hiding, though; the girl wants to avoid attention but not enough to hinder her movement. She speeds, as she always does, towards the official Prospitian armory. No one stops her, so neither does Jadebot. But she feels, as always, the bizarre irregularity of her radio output, the way it expands and contracts until the steep in-out of its existence is as much of a signal as the wave itself.

Dot-dot-hold, dot-dot-hold. Thumping like something’s _alive_ in there.

 

“So about three Earth weeks to the Skaia system, I think,” Harley says the next morning – or what approximates as “morning” on Kanaya’s personal clock. She also says, “Call me Jade.”

Kanaya wakes up slowly without the sun to warm her, with nothing but the low florescent lights on the ceiling to drag her from her bed. Jade hands her a breakfast packet once she gets herself upright. Kanaya assumes (prays) that the ship is being run on auto-pilot.

“You don’t have to adjust your schedule to meet mind, you know! I know you guys sleep at daytime-”

“Thank you,” she says, taking the pack. It’s emblazoned with “EGGS” in bright red letters; Kanaya would have liked to contest this notion. “But I keep an unusual schedule, for an Alternian.”

Jade shrugs and takes it in stride. “There’s really no difference out here anyway. I just sleep whenever. Not that I don’t miss the sun… _my_ sun, that is.” She smiles with a ready softness that Kanaya is unused to. She has met trolls, of course, with such gentleness in their bodies, but they betray it only warily, so completely on-pain-of-death that everything is tainted by the time it reaches the surface. Jade has no such reservations. She plops down in a worn metal chair and folds a table out from the wall in front of her. She gestures to the seat across, and Kanaya reads “we do things different here” into her every motion.

She returns a smile cautiously, taking a step towards her personal bag. “My hair is usually a mess upon waking.”

“It looks great,” Jade says. She crosses an ankle over a knee, resting her leg against the arm of her chair. “Let’s get to know each other,” she adds, and something in her grin shifts slightly towards the authoritative, just enough to make Kanaya reluctantly abandon her quest for a hairbrush and take a seat.

“What would you like to know?” she asks, conscientiously crossing her ankles. She wills herself not to play with her fingers.

“Just…about you! You said you’re a tailor; what kind of clothes do you make? Why do you sell all the way in Prospit? I’ve only been to a few places on Alternia, but where are you from?”

Oh heavens, Kanaya thinks, three more weeks. She has worried about this, because she is a _terrible_ liar. She shifts back in her seat, trying to appease the guilty twist of her insides. “It’s not that I don’t find you to be interesting as a travel partner, Captain –”

“Jade.”

“…Jade. And I am sure that we will have many an interesting conversation on our way to Prospit, preferably with significant contributions from each party (possibly leading to a much-increased understanding between our two cultures), but at the moment there are certain factors that I would rather not discuss.” She tugs at the EGGS, fingers slipping nervously against the wrapping. “I don’t mean to say that you are, of course, untrustworthy, but we _have_ only just met, and perhaps –”

Jade waves her hand dismissively – vigorously so. So insistently does she shake it that Kanaya at first worries that she’s having some kind of seizure. “No no, that’s fine! Oh I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to pry, I just like talking to people, and I thought that maybe we…I, um…”

She grins, then jumps to her feet, chair clattering. The movements are so sudden and inelegant that Kanaya startles, and the packet of EGGS rips down the middle, spilling pasty EGG substitute over the table.

Jade apologizes just as frenetically, smiling sheepishly and talking loudly about cloths, and Kanaya realizes that space travel must be incredibly lonely.

She stands up in the awkward, half-apologetic manner of someone who has made a mess of another person’s house. Jade finds a cloth and wipes the table down, chattering about how she’s been sure the artificial gravity is just the slightest bit off, and if she has time she’ll get right to fixing it, because she’s good with her hands, yaknow, and if Kanaya ever wants to see how a gravity simulator works she should come right down to the engine room with her sometime.

“How long has your partner been absent?” Kanaya asks, tone delicate.

“About an Earth year and a half now,” she says, just as chipper, glancing up at Kanaya through her dark bangs. “I’ve had other company, though. When we get to Prospit I’m going to get her back.”

“Her?”

“My new partner,” she says, picking off the last bits of EGG. “If I…if she wants to come back.”

They dispose of the rag – a hole in the wall sucks it right up – and Kanaya turns down a new packet. Jade smiles at her (does she ever stop?) with the same bright softness, quickly shaking off…whatever this was. The quick darting eyes behind the glasses don’t hover for long anymore. Kanaya feels dreadfully like she’s insulted her host, and that her host is trying to make her feel at home again and it’s just mixing things up worse than ever. Kanaya doesn’t even know what they’ve been trying not to mix.

“So...three more weeks until sunlight,” she says.

“Yep!” Jade replies. “Um.” They stand quietly for a moment. “How about that gravity simulator?”

“I’d love to see it,” Kanaya says, nodding vigorously. Her stomach unknots slightly.

By the time they’ve finished going over every inch of the engine room, Jade looking earnestly back at her from each mechanic’s nook and cranny as she describes the function of the machines, she feels much lighter. The Captain is an easy talker, and Kanaya doesn’t tell her about the streak of grease across her cheek until she grabs Jade’s hand to pull her out from the work pit below the simulator. She looks good that way, competent and professional and ready to take on any challenge, and Kanaya sees in the jaunty spring of her elbows as she monkeys with her wrenches that she feels it, too.

 

Eleven nights later, she hasn’t come.

Prospitian days are very quick (.434 Earth days, Jadebot knows unquestionably). The world spins frantically on its little axis as the people brace themselves for every assault, sending endless waves of soldiers to the bloodbath on Skaia’s surface and leaving ever fewer carapaces to work the home planet. Jadebot has a solid job helping to pick up that slack. She thinks this is probably because she can fly and also she is very friendly and helpful. “A pretty competent drone,” the commissioner called her just the other day!

Jadebot is definitely a helper. She’s helping both the Prospitian people, who are so nice and sunny, and also the Real Jade, who is back having adventures on her spaceship. Jadebot liked the spaceship, but Prospit is definitely great, too.

But it’s eleven nights later, and the mysterious robot lady hasn’t come. This is backwards from how things are supposed to be. For as long as Jadebot has been on Prospit, the foreign body has arrived one day earlier for every three arrivals. She always shows up at the same time of night, and seems to be gone by morning. Jadebot doesn’t want to think about it too hard, but she’s pretty sure she’s worried.

She continues along her transport route, distracted enough to nearly collide head-on with an armored ship filled with genetic soldiers. She apologizes, but she doesn’t have the heart to pay attention while she does it. She knows she has to keep working; Real Jade is counting on her to make money! Real Jade doesn’t know that Jadebot has been working very hard day and night, just to give her that extra bit of cash by the time Real Jade swings by to pick it up.

But she can’t help but be distracted. She’s been looking forward to seeing the lady, if only because she can usually predict exactly when and where she will appear. They cross routes directly, or at least they’re supposed to.

Jadebot finishes her route and comes back to the place she was supposed to see the woman four hours ago. There isn’t much option of where to go when the commissioner can’t find her anything else to do for awhile. She doesn’t need to sleep or eat, and her creator did such a good job that she rarely needs repairs. Sometimes if she’s feeling particularly vain she’ll stop by for a quick coat of paint, brightening the Prospitian gold color that she’s adopted quite willingly for her chassis.

She sits on the ground underneath a bus station canopy (it’s important to always leave the bench open for those less able!) and switches to hibernate mode, letting her mind wander across Prospit through maps and diagrams and information she’s pulled from public databases.

The light of Skaia is starting to streak the western sky when she sees her. The robot moves erratically this time, her rocket catching and sputtering, red eyes straining to stay lit. Every clunking piece of her seems to lean forward, stretching towards the armory four blocks away, but by now her trajectory is more down than straight across, tripping over the air until she’s falling headfirst towards the golden pavement.

Jadebot barely has time to rocket straight back through active mode into Hero Mode, sights fixating on the plummeting body as she reroutes all power to primary functions and _zooms_ to the rescue!

She catches her three feet from the ground, the speed slamming the silver body against her chest as the two of them rocket towards the other side of the street and the hard glittering wall of the fire station. Jadebot activates her emergency stopping mechanism, jets firing to life down her front and blazing across the woman’s chassis. It works, but the angle of her body in flight is absolutely terrible for this and her lower body flips up from under her, sending the two of them careening into the ground.

She loses hold of the lady, flipping onto her back with a resounding clash. A slightly louder one follows and a silver arm flops over her chest. The sound echoes down the empty street.

“Ouch,” she says mildly, because she’s been programmed to give damage reports despite not having nerve endings. Then, “Are you okay?”

The arm is removed. Jadebot sits up in time to see the woman’s retreating back.

“Wait, don’t go!” She catches up with her easily; the stranger has abandoned her rockets entirely, reduced to three auxiliary wheels at the base of her metal skirt. As she bumps along the road her arms hang loose in a disturbingly lifeless manner; one shoulder is cut deeply, straight to the sparking wiring within.

“You’re hurt!” She gingerly touches the base of the cut and the woman recoils, nearly setting her off-balance entirely.

“Impossible,” she says. The voice is unnaturally serene under a coating of tinny distortion and what sounds like radio interference. “Machines can’t be hurt.”

“You know what I mean!” Jadebot says. “There are repair shops around here; let me help you.”

The woman slowly turns her head, the joint between neck and shoulders creaking uncomfortably. She refuses to stop moving forward, but Jadebot feels the red light of her scan; she returns the courtesy and analyzes the very limited data that comes up.

MODEL: Aradia  
DESIGNATION: Dreambot

That…is nothing like what this information is supposed to look like! Jadebot knows that her own stats are filled with travel logs and primary functions and numbers for a name.

“You’re really interesting,” she says enthusiastically. “Can I help you?”

Aradiabot – is that what she likes to be called? – turns away, continuing to bounce wordlessly down the street. Her chassis gleams in the light of a steadily-rising Skaia, reflecting the burn of countless glowing buildings.

“Wait a second,” Jadebot calls again, a bit exasperated now, “at least let me –”

A shout jolts through her and she’s halfway out of her bunk before she’s figured out why she’s awake, legs dangling off the side, one hand fumbling for her glasses and the other for her pistol and she has to get to the gun deck _now –_

Jade Harley hears a quiet moan from the bed beneath her.

She stops to breathe.

Kanaya shifts on her mattress, making quiet sounds of discomfort. If Jade thinks about it hard enough she can trace the sudden noise that woke her to that same voice, raised in a pain that, while evidently not harmless, is a helluva lot better than the ship being under fire. She remembers her brother slamming the door open, shouting “all hands on deck” as if that really meant something on a two-person craft that is definitely not a _boat,_ John, and making a frantic run for the cockpit. Her own corresponding motions are more delicately crafted into her muscles than she would care to admit to a passenger.

They’re still quite a ways out from any of the conflict, but you never know.

She listens in silence, feet dangling, until it becomes clear that Kanaya’s sleep isn’t going to get any better. She’s muttering something, but Jade is learning a little something about the privacy of dreams and she doesn’t try very hard to figure out what she’s saying. She thinks she hears an unfamiliar girl’s name.

Maybe a month ago she would have shaken her awake and demanded to know what was bothering her, because really she doesn’t like hearing her friends in pain and would do anything she could to fix it!

Now when she tries to think of her own dreams all she can remember is golden spires and “dot-dot-hold” and the rattle of rusty wheels on pavement. Why hadn’t she noticed, while asleep, how badly worn the robot’s wheels were? She hates when things get all rusty, they look unloved. Why hadn’t she noticed?

But Kanaya is still murmuring and Jade’s heart hurts for it, so she leaps to the floor and lands with as loud of a “thud” as possible. Kanaya jumps and stirs, blinking blearily awake.

“Oh my gosh I’m so sorry, did I wake you up?” Jade asks, over-loud. “I think I’ll be awake for now, but feel free to get right back to sleep.”

Kanaya rubs at her eyes, and Jade is struck by how incredibly precious that looks. Kanaya is awfully precious. She’s also very pretty, even with her hair all messy and sticking to her cheeks. It’s only been a week and Jade already feels incredibly fond of her guest. She made Kanaya tea once and she looked so poised and elegant drinking it that now she has the desire to make Kanaya tea pretty much _all the time._

“No, I think I’ll join you,” she says, voice groggy, and Jade checks to make sure the circles under her eyes aren’t too dark. It’s hard getting used to the complete lack of reasonable timekeeping aboard a space vessel.

“Don’t rush yourself,” she says, and she feels wisps of something warm and familiar in the pit of her stomach when she says, “I’ll make you some tea.”


	2. Chapter 2

“ – to your home on Derse?” Jadebot scans Aradiabot in concern, taking in the dents in her hard-flowing hair.

“Of course,” she replies. “It’s really my only purpose, so there wouldn’t be a reason _not_ to make it back.” Her words fluctuate and never quite match up into a natural speech pattern; it’s obvious that she’s an older model.

“It’s not about whether or not you’re _supposed_ to make it back,” Jadebot says worriedly. She turns to the repair bots for help, but they’re too intent on fixing Aradiabot’s shoulder to pay any attention to moral dilemmas.

“What other reason exists?” Aradiabot shifts forward on the table to give them better access to her circuitry.

“To keep yourself safe?” Jadebot asks, then realizes what she’s just said. She focuses her viewports determinedly on the tools laid out on the table, so as not to have to see the skepticism whirring behind Aradiabot’s oculars.

“Machines are invented to carry out a specific purpose. When they fail, they’re terminated.” The cool voice has all of the lifeless charm of an automated telephone operator. “What’s your purpose.”

“To help Real Jade,” she answers, voice faltering.

“And are you.”

The silence lays heavy, only punctuated by the sound of soldering. Jadebot forces herself to look up at Aradiabot, taking in the terrible calmness set in her hard skin. She shudders and runs a file.

>SCANNING  
>DEFINE_DIRECTIVE

“Stop,” Aradiabot says, cool voice louder. “Don’t do that, that wasn’t what I meant.”

Jadebot gasps in relief (makes the accompanying sound, at least) and shakes her head.

Aradiabot pushes off the repair bot, rotating her shoulder. “You’re definitely serving _a_ purpose. You’re helping, I guess. I don’t know.” She stands and fixes Jadebot with a hard scan. “You just run differently than any bot I’ve ever seen. You’ve helped me all day for literally no reason at all, and as far as I can tell it’s in no way related to your primary function.”

Jadebot giggles.

“Did you just chuckle,” Aradiabot drones. Jadebot can almost imagine the bewilderment in the words.

“It’s a habit, I guess.”

“That’s a really bizarre idiosyncrasy for a machine.”

The two of them leave together, pushing their way through the evening rush home (mostly carapaces with a few trolls and humans interspersed in the crowd). Aradiabot seems to press instinctively towards walls and dark places.

“You know no one really minds you being here,” Jadebot reminds her brightly. “I guess you’re not used to being in such a lit-up place, huh? I bet–”

“Goodbye,” Aradiabot says, and takes off above the skyline.

“Wooooow, rude!” Jadebot says, and jets up to follow her.

 

“Space dirt for science!”Jade says, shaking a spacesuit helmet in Kanaya’s face.

“Pardon?” Kanaya sets down her tea, lest she spill something else all over the little table. Jade’s got the gravity simulator down exactly, or so she says, but Kanaya’s limbs feel just the slightest bit heavier than back on Alternia. Likely this is reflective of the comparative sizes of their planets. Two weeks has been nearly long enough to adjust, but sometimes she still feels cumbersomely tired.

“We’re going through a dust cloud that’s pinged the radar for rare space stuff.”

“You have a mechanism specifically for detecting –”

“Yes, yep,” she says impatiently, jamming the helmet down over her head. She’s covered her green uniform with an even brighter, bulkier version obviously meant for outdoor excursions (outdoor _space_ excursions). “Hurry up and get dressed before we pass it!”

“You want me to go out?” she asks, bemused. “Do we really have the time for this? I–”

“Let’s goooo,” she says, her voice coming out a bit muffled from the speaker above her throat. “It’s super pretty, Kanaya, and you like such pretty things.” And as if that logic seals the deal she bounds away to throw open the “space closet,” suddenly all energy and solid, decisive movements that will bear no resistance, even as her ridiculous boots clomp and knock against the leg of their bunk bed.

“You’re certainly enthusiastic today.”

Jade pulls out a secondary suit, just as bright, and hikes it up over her shoulder. One empty arm flops over and pats her on the tailbone like a rather handsy ghost. “It’s one of my favorite things, going outside. I just really want to share with you.” She hauls the suit to Kanaya’s table. “Sorry it’s not the most fashionable design, but I’m sure you’ll look great anyway.” She smiles almost roguishly then, and plops the suit down on the table with a heavy _clunk._

“I don’t know what to think about this,” Kanaya says, and prods at one of the fingers. She should be protesting more vigorously. She can’t afford this delay.

Jade apparently isn’t listening. “I kind of wanted to apologize,” she says, barreling forward without any hint of apology in her tone. “The past year has been pretty hard for me! And if I ever do something really weird, I mean like _actually_ weird, not like ‘gee whiz why does she brush her teeth in the hallway’ weird, then please let me know!” She tries to put her hands on her hips but the thick cushioning of the spacesuit does not lend itself well to this.

Instead of doing the nice thing and giving such an apology its due consideration, Kanaya has the distracting urge to laugh as the monstrous, visually catastrophic thing that will serve as Jade’s protection from the (lack of) elements abandons one of its own to be puppeted by her own dark whims.

“These are actually really terrible,” she says by means of acceptance.

Jade _does_ laugh, the same barking sound that Kanaya has grown to adore in the past two weeks. “Yeah, but if anybody can pull it off it’s probably going to be you!”

 

Kanaya steps out of the airlock chamber.

It’s dark, the silence pressing in on her eardrums past the sound of her own breathing bouncing back towards her through the filtration systems. The stars look larger than they do on Alternia, but not by much. Bright pricks of light in the distance, they are too unfathomably, impossibly far away to to inhabit the same plane of being as two achingly miniscule specks of consciousness in a sea of empty and black.

If Kanaya focuses in on that void, concentrates on the “nothing at all,” she can feel her insides evaporating through the fibers of her artificial shell as the absolute lack of being presses down on her, heavier than air.

Something bumps against her hand. She turns behind her (slightly dusty) headgear to see Jade smiling (how does she keep so weightless?), the inside of her helmet aglow with artificial light. When she tilts her chin just so, Kanaya can see individual lashes ablaze from underneath, the sharp contrast on soft cheekbones. “Look,” she says, the words rattling in their radio channel like fizzing chemical reactions, “They’re sparkling.”

Kanaya nods; she sees the stars perfectly well, and they are coldly beautiful as they blur through the back of Jade’s helmet to reflect against her eyes.

They go quickly out of focus, the dust thickening on her glass until all she can see is space dirt, grey-brown and –

“They’re _sparkling!_ ” Kanaya says in surprise, and Jade hums in appreciation. Grains of colorful, glittering dust press themselves against her helmet, by turns white-bright and fading to a timid glow. She reaches up and clumsily wipes down the outside of the glass, giving herself a window to see that they have been surrounded by the stuff, caught in a slow, subtle tidal wave of shimmering sand, surging silently against their suits, between their floating figures and through the impossible dark. It catches in the lights of the ship, brilliant and changing, molding itself against their shapes to fill the void to the brim with miniature points of light.

“What’s it made of?” Kanaya asks in wonder, reaching out to grab at a stream (it runs through her clunky fingers and escapes).

“I don’t know!” Jade says, and she sounds positively giddy. Kanaya catches the look on her face, all unfettered wonder and the beginning of days, and feels her body go warm against the unending cold.

“It’s beautiful,” she says with reverence, but now all she can watch is the play of artificial lights against the stray strands of Jade’s hair. Oh, dear. She really can’t afford this. It’s too soon, too late –

Jade turns to face her and grabs her shoulders (as best as she can with the suit), and Kanaya is positive that her sharp intake of breath can be heard across their intercom link loud and clear. The motion pushes Kanaya downwards as Jade rises slightly, surrounded by a universe ablaze and shimmering. In a sudden motion she bumps their helmets together at the forehead, sending a shudder down Kanaya’s neckpiece and into her chest. Human-green eyes flicker upwards, filled to the brim with light, like she’s taken space itself and contracted it into two points so that Kanaya may look at all of its wonders at her convenience.

“Thank you for coming out with me,” she says, “It’s so _different_ when you can share it.”

Kanaya’s view is blocked more every second by the dust congealing on her helmet, but she can see well enough to follow her silly, untrained impulses and awkwardly place her own encased hands on Jade’s shoulders, wishing she could feel the life beneath them before the moment disappears. She can’t afford this _at all,_ but if her books have taught her anything, this moment is the beginning of something doomed and catch-breath beautiful, and must be treated with reverence.

(Something nostalgic hurts, in her chest, but she pushes it to the side.)

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything,” she says carefully. She feels, dramatic as she knows she’s being, like she’s imposing an oath on the stars.

“You’re such a cutie-patootie!” Jade practically squeals, and draws back just enough to butt their helmets together again.

 

“ – completely unnecessary.”

“No, I’m going to help you!” Jadebot keeps pace with Aradiabot easily, her rockets being much newer and lighter. The two of them were built with the same designation (“dreambot”) and now fulfill the same purpose (“transport”), so Jadebot can’t help but think that she’d be the perfect person to help with whatever the mission here is.

“It’s dangerous, and not important to you.”

“Hey, you can’t decide what’s important to me!”

Aradiabot doesn’t turn to face her this time, her gaze focused on the night sky and the upper-limit customs official currently perched in a booth floating far above most of the planet. The official gives the two of them a brief glance, then hurriedly looks the other way. They pass through into the outer atmosphere without slowing.

“You’re not supposed to be able to decide what’s important to you, either,” Aradiabot says in her flat voice. “How do you keep doing that.”

“I’ve been waiting for you ever since you left the last time,” Jadebot says, letting the steel drop from her tone. She doesn’t like fighting. “Did you get that stuff you’ve been waiting for? You’re not towing anything this time, either.”

“I have information, at least. Weapon designs and assault plans. I always get those.” Then, “Over the course of six Derse years I have transferred close to the entire body of Prospitian war plans into Dersian hands.”

There is a brief silence as Jadebot processes this information. Her meters register the steadily decreasing air pressure and she reroutes extra power to her rockets so as to achieve escape velocity. Skaia shines brighter every second over the curve of the planet.

“You wouldn’t want to betray your adoptive people,” Aradiabot drones. Jadebot thinks she can read impatience in the tone; she’s getting better at understanding the little quirks of individuality under the deadened voice.

“Hey, do you guys do sports on Derse?”

Now Aradiabot turns her head ninety degrees to the left so as to scan her visually. “Are you really so noncommittal about this?” (Confusion.)

“I don’t think you’d hurt Prospit like that,” Jadebot says cheerfully.

“I just told you.” (Caution.)

“You’re way too good to be taking info to the bad guys! Plus, the good guys don’t ever try and stop you. I think you’re just a helper, like me! Wow, I’m sorry that stuff you needed didn’t come in yet. Maybe next time! Ten Prospitian days round trip now, right? Derse and Prospit sure are getting closer fast, huh? War sure is icky. Hey, I bet – ”

“Stop talking.” (Anger.)

“Why?”

“You’re a naïve, stupid little machine.” (Stronger now.)

“ _I know you are, but what_ – Hey, I’m sorry!”

Aradiabot jets off into interplanetary space, probably as fast as her rockets can manage. Jadebot isn’t very good at knowing what to do when people are sad or angry, other than to tell them to stop being sad and angry, which she guesses sometimes makes them more angry? So instead she follows behind, giving Aradiabot a little space. It’s a pretty long journey, and Jadebot is so _curious,_ but she can wait awhile.

It’s not like she can go back now that she’s totally skipped out on the commissioner, but she works by the hour, right? So that’s okay. That has to be okay. Real Jade would understand. Real Jade –

 

Real Jade wakes smoothly, to the sound of Kanaya subtly trying to make herself some EGGS. From the sound of things it isn’t going so well.

Jade scrunches her eyes shut and rubs her hands down her face, trying very hard to remember the most pertinent details of her dream.

It isn’t that she has trouble remembering what happens. The dreambot is astoundingly clear, and the memories sit realistically in her mind once she’s woken up. The disturbing part is thinking determinedly about the parts that seem strange in hindsight and realizing that she makes decisions as a robot that are entirely outside of what her awake self would generally deem a “good idea.” This becomes scarily apparent when she thinks about how she actually made the decision to leave Prospit entirely, with a _Dersian spy_ no less! It doesn’t add up. That’s before taking into account the headache-inducing way her sleeping self thinks of her awake self as the “Real Jade.”

This is going to cause _so_ much trouble.

She swings herself down from her bunk, giving Kanaya her best smile. Her passenger is so pretty, always refined and classy and put-together even when she’s just woken up and is trying to stir some life into terrible Earth food substitute.

“Would you like some EGGS?” Kanaya asks, and holds up a bowl of the gelatinous monstrosity. Jade takes it and wolfs it down with relish.

She might be going crazy, and that’s a scary thought. But the only other option doesn’t make any scientific sense, no matter what her Alternian contact thinks. (It’s so sad, the way he sits with his room full of smashed-up robots and tells her brokenly that he could have saved her, if only he had been willing to help sooner).

The problem remains that her dreambot actively makes decisions outside of her awareness, even when she’s awake. And to be honest, that’s really scary.

“How much longer until we’ve entered the Skaia system?” Kanaya looks up at her from her place at the table, concern at Jade’s silence written very clearly into her expression. The tailor is just so bad at hiding her emotions, and Jade loves it, because that makes two of them.

She leans down to smack a kiss against Kanaya’s furrowed brow, and ignores the way Kanaya jumps just slightly in favor of watching the lovely green flush of her cheeks. “Shouldn’t be another day ‘til we get to the outside of the Veil.”

Kanaya looks anxious now, which was not, of course, Jade’s intention. When they were floating in stardust it had seemed so obvious and easy! But now she’s been hesitant to press forward because whenever she gets too close Kanaya turns her cheek, or decides she needs to check on her wares.

She’s been doing that a lot lately.

“So you’re gonna sell some designs to the Prospitians, right?” Jade asks, sitting down across the table. They’ve taken this position so many times by now, each in her own seat, and it feels entirely natural.

Kanaya hesitates before answering. “Yes. Mostly fashionable wear for upperclasswomen and -men, but I usually have some new prototypes for low-atmosphere environments. There are a few that I’ve been wanting to try out.”

“Like how low?”

Kanaya takes dainty bites of her EGGS, by this point swallowing them down almost like they taste good. “Well…to be specific, the Veil.”

“Oh!” Jade says, “We can test them on our way by!”

“What?” Kanaya looks more startled than this kind of declaration should warrant. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to impede our progress –”

“It’d only take like an hour. Dersian colonies don’t come out this far along the orbit, so we should be safe. And anyway, I’d take a gun. Not that we’d need it, haha! I want to see what you’ve come up with!”

Kanaya looks wary, her glance moving from her EGGS, to the floor (her wares are stockpiled in the storage bay below their feet), then finally coming to rest on Jade’s face, where a real smile has found its place again. She seems to take that into consideration.

Her fangs, pressed against her lower lip in thought, suddenly loosen their grip. “I suppose…as long as we go quickly–”

“I’m the Captain,” Jade says, resting her elbow proudly on the table. “And I say we can afford a stop.”

Kanaya smiles past the worry.

Jade doesn’t ask because she doesn’t want to pry. This is what she tells herself quite resolutely.

 

The surface of the asteroid is almost chalky; eroded patches of dust blasted by Skaian winds of eons past sit completely undisturbed between low rocky outcroppings and small craters. The Veil is unique in that it collectively maintains a thin atmosphere of its own, the mass of its component parts dragging down thin wisps of oxygen that may have come from some form of life, long ago. The Dersians are working on supplementing it, depositing scraggly little plants and odd black boxes that no one else understands, but for now breathing comes only with difficulty.

Jade wears a space helmet and her least bulky outdoor-environment uniform, and Kanaya wears something completely different.

“Woooow!” Jade says, and then repeats herself a few times for good measure. Kanaya is decked out in a dark lavender shade, the almost scaly material skin-tight and extremely flattering against her long legs. When Jade gets to her ankles she stares at those for awhile – Kanaya has the most elegant ankles Jade has ever had the privilege of seeing, ever – before processing the boots seamlessly connected to the rest of the suit. They’re heels, high enough that her feet arch almost like a ballerina’s, but the “heel” of each shoe consists of a wide, flexible silver ring, flattened slightly by the pressure between Kanaya’s body and the ground. She takes a step forward and Jade marvels at the way the rings reinflate and sink down again, compensating for the boots’ ridiculous height with an easy stability. Instead of using a helmet for air, her mouth is covered by a matching scarf that trails behind her dramatically in the low gravity.

“Hot dang!” Jade also throws in.

Kanaya rolls her eyes sort of modestly, but Jade can tell she’s pleased. She doesn’t seem to know how to react to such inarticulate praise, her hand finding its way to her hip before flatting against her side again. She doesn’t look _humble_ though; Jade gets the distinct impression that she knows she did well and was pretty much just waiting for confirmation. Fashion is obviously a subject she knows a great deal about.

“How does that scarf let you breathe?” she asks, stepping closer. Kanaya pulls the fabric down to reveal a flat bubble-like air rig pressed against her mouth. Jade moves excitedly behind her to see a tube stretching down behind the fabric at the nape of her neck. “That’s genius!” she says. Kanaya’s hair is pushed up messily by the back of the scarf, black strands arraying themselves pell-mell (stylish!) against the fabric.

“I have a good mechanic. Actually the rig itself isn’t new, but the current models were honestly so damn ugly that I had him redesign one. No one gives a thought to subtlety, is the main thing here. Subtlety where it matters I mean, because, alright, I really enjoy the scarf, despite…”

Kanaya trails off briefly and Jade wonders if she’s noticed how blatantly the captain is taking advantage of her new position to stare at her ass.

“So, this place is nice,” Kanaya says loudly, turning to face her. She pulls the scarf back over her mouth.

“Uh-huh,” Jade replies articulately. “I’ll bet that outfit will be a great success!”

“Thank you,” she says, glancing away briefly.

“It’d be great for the colonies! I mean, Prospit doesn’t really get into it like Derse does, and the color – ”

“This is nice,” Kanaya breaks in, suddenly tense, “but I wouldn’t want us to delay for too long. You’re meeting your friend on Prospit, and it would be rude for me to take up more of your time.”

Jade frowns, frantically rummaging through the conversation to figure out what she’s done wrong. “Hey, are you mad at me?”

Kanaya blinks, not a quick and confused flutter, but the slow, tired motions of someone who regretfully saw this coming. “No, not at all, I…I’ve just told you, my business – ”

For a fraction of a second, her eyes go wide, fixed on something over Jade’s shoulder. Then in a blur of motion Jade is being thrown to the ground, helmet cracking against the rock and bouncing too far back in the minimal gravity. Then come the light and the sound, the roar of detonation and stars in her eyes.

She fumbles for her gun before she can see again, the sound of rapid laser fire coming from somewhere close to her prone body. She looks up to see Dersian scouts – _shit_ – standing on a wide crest, weapons drawn, the one in the center shouldering something that looks like a grenade launcher.

In the next second he goes down, blasted through the center by laser fire. Purple and silver boots plant themselves in front of Jade’s nose briefly before Kanaya dodge rolls fluidly to the left, crouching low to the ground with one leg extended, and fires again. Another scout goes down. Her scarf floats eerily behind her, slow to fall in alien air.

Jade _moves,_ scrambling to her feet and away from the center of fire. She takes cover behind a gently rising slope as laser blasts fly with piercing sonic aftermath above her head. She cocks her gun, and with a series of loud clicks, it extends to twice its normal size, expanding fans to the sides giving an impression of width.

“Dammit!” she shouts, and sets the chargers warming. Metal plates fan from the gun’s solid tip, forming a shining circle that blurs as they begin to spin.

Kanaya dives behind the slope, almost stumbling over Jade’s legs as she crouches down; the fire increases twice over. “They’re picking up the launcher,” she says, and before Jade can say a word she runs back out into harm’s way.

She stands tall this time, extending her weapon in a straight line from the side of her body, long, slender legs planted firmly apart. Her torso faces Jade as her visage cuts a dramatic profile, eyes blazing and deadly level. She fires once, and Jade cranes her neck up to see a Dersian go straight down, a hole burned through the dead center of his forehead. The launcher falls to the ground again, and the rest of their attackers swarm around it in confusion.

Kanaya doesn’t move for a fraction of a second, unoccupied hand curled into a dainty fist at her side, and her cold eyes send a thrill down Jade’s spine.

Jade’s gun buzzes in her hands, and she flips a switch.

Light fills the center of the spinning circle, which is now emitting a high-pitched whine and shaking with energy, sending vibrations through her bones. She stares until it’s pooled too white-hot to bear anymore, then she ducks out from behind the slope.

“Get down!” she shouts, “I have a _really big gun!”_

Kanaya moves, and Jade fires. The blast is five times larger than the gun itself, and she’s nearly thrown stumbling by the force of it. The streaking ball of energy moves fast and too bright to look at, and when it hits the ground where the Dersians stand, the explosion rocks her off her feet.

Her helmet is immediately pinged with a barrage of falling rubble and she curls to her side, eyes scrunched tight until the ground vibrations fade away.

There is a brief silence, then Kanaya is frenetically jiggling her shoulder.

“Jade,” she asks, voice badly feigning calm, “Jade, are you alright?”

Jade grabs her arm instinctively, eyelids fluttering open. She smiles weakly, taking in Kanaya’s wide green eyes and the way they convey everything above that dramatic scarf. “Yeah, I’m okay. I…didn’t want that to happen, but I’m okay.”

Kanaya pulls her to her feet very gently. She seems to want to keep touching her, running her hands down her shoulders and reaching up as if to fix Jade’s wretchedly mussed hair before remembering the helmet in the way.

“It’s okay, Kanaya,” she says, and looks with regret at the place of impact. It’s dark and charred and unforgiving, and she shudders. “Well, I am.” She squeezes Kanaya’s arm before grasping her hand, interlacing their fingers tightly. “But where did you learn to shoot like that? I mean _wow,_ that was sooooo...wow!”

Kanaya looks grim. “We probably need to move. An asteroid isn’t by its nature incredibly stable; we’ve probably disrupted it beyond repair.” She glances across the horizon in the direction from which their attackers had come. “There could be a colony. I’m surprised they’ve decided to come this far out, they usually…” Something in the knit of her brow is somehow hesitant, despite her words, and she takes half a step forward before Jade pulls her by the hand back towards the ship.

There are a lot of mysterious things about Kanaya, Jade decides. She knows about fighting and colonies and asteroids, and Jade would like to understand.


	3. Chapter 3

“ – trip to Derse wasn’t _that_ bad! Just because we had to dodge and hide from drones and soldiers and gigantic genetic monstrosities doesn’t mean it was terrible!”

The group looks back at her somewhat warily, but Jadebot doesn’t mind. She guesses it _is_ pretty weird that she just decided to drop in on them, especially when Aradiabot was being so sneaky about getting into the dark, dank warehouse where they were meeting.

“Whale, it’s a pretty rough job,” says a troll, taking command with a pointy smile. She is very pretty, with gills on the sides of her neck, and she sits on an old barrel like it’s a throne. “That’s why we’re always really glad to have Aradiabot to help us out!”

Aradiabot stands in the corner, running on minimum power judging on the dullness of her eyes. She doesn’t react to hearing her name.

The fact that they has to hide from Dersian guards on the way in, and not Prospitian ones, just reinforces Jadebot’s idea that Aradiabot is one of the good guys. Plus, everybody here seems pretty nice! There’s the gill troll, and a quiet, gangly one with weird blue and red glasses. They’re surrounded by mostly carapaces and a couple of humans, pressed tightly into the warehouse like they’d be ready to spill out into the street if they added just one more body. Everybody seems focused on being very quiet.

“Sorry Fef, but we don’t really have time to deal with this bullshit,” the boy troll says. “The bot didn’t get the guns.” He looks indifferent behind his glasses, but he speaks with a tight urgency.

Fef worries her lower lip with her fang, then turns to scan the carapaces. “When is he getting here?”

Murmurs spread through the crowd, before someone ventures to answer, “Late.”

She nods, slowly at first, and then firmly. “Okay, then. Plan B goes into effect im _me_ diately!” She sometimes pronounces her “e’s” in a piercing way that Jadebot entertains herself by monitoring in terms of decibel.

The carapaces seem somewhat worried, and the whispering intensifies.

“Don’t worry,” she says, a bit too loudly, and the troll with the glasses rests his hand on her shoulder. “I know what’s best for us. _He_ doesn’t need to worry about this. It was our job to get the weapons, and I intend to get them, shrimp-ly as that!” She turns to face Jadebot with a toothy smile. “Cuttle pie, are you any good in combat situations?”

“Oh, not at all!” Jadebot says loudly, before she’s hushed by the crowd. “Oh, not at all,” she repeats more softly. “War is scary and gross. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it if I didn’t have to be, I just came to help Aradiabot.”

The boy troll’s hand twitches on Fef’s shoulder. “She probably didn’t need help, if you’re just gonna sit here and shit your metal pants about it,” he says, more acid in his tone than before. Fef reaches up to pat his hand.

“I’m sorry,” Jadebot says. “I just can’t! I mean, I promise I won’t tell anybody about you guys, but fighting is _waaaaay_ too scary for me.”

The murmurs turn darker.

“I’m sorry, darling,” the troll lady says. “But if you won’t come, I think you’ll have to stay here for awhile. Just until things blowfish over a little bit.”

Later Jadebot asks Aradiabot why she got involved in something as terrible as a war.

She tells her she doesn’t have a choice, because she was involved even when she was alive. She is continuing the legacy, she says, and they need her.

Jadebot tells her that robots were never flesh-and-blood alive, silly, but for some reason Aradiabot doesn’t believe her, even when Jadebot tells her that being a robot isn’t the same as being dead.

 

Prospit is golden and blazing, and as the _Space Crevice_ hovers into low orbit, Kanaya feels a rush of warmth. She has missed this place and its cheerful, optimistic citizenry, the way they are drawn to the gaudiest of her works as long as they blend well with the city’s color scheme. She thinks ahead to the little shops she’ll visit, the way the salespeople will rush to greet her half out of capitalistic duty and half out of sheer affection.

They nearly collide head-on with an armored transport, and Kanaya misses the _old_ Prospit just a little bit more.

“Whoops, sorry about that!” Jade says. She sounds mostly unconcerned. Kanaya grips her armrest a bit tighter.

They land with only the slightest of unnecessary bumps. Kanaya can feel the city pressing in against them, the low buzz of carapacian chatter and the hum of engines. She and Jade move to the loading dock, hovering near the wide ramp door.

“So, I suppose this is it,” she says, and Jade looks almost wounded. Kanaya’s stomach twists uncomfortably, but it’s not her fault. She just can’t afford this.

The captain’s expression lightens quickly, a smile tacked brightly to her lips. “Well, I’ll help you unload, then I guess I’ll get a room somewhere. Where do you need to take this stuff?”

“Various places,” Kanaya responds, shuffling slightly. Jade hasn’t opened the bay doors yet and they are too airtight to let light shine through any cracks. “Shops, and…well, I’ll just get a transport drone, it won’t be any trouble, I wouldn’t want to cause you any…trouble.”

Jade keeps smiling, her fingers twirling against each other slowly. There is something puppyish in her expression, sad and lonely just behind the muscles it takes her to grin.

Kanaya sighs. “I suppose I’ll need a room as well. We could probably save on funds if we choose to lodge together.”

Jade’s face is suddenly megawatts brighter, and then she’s moving in a burst of energy and awkward grace, hitting the button for the doors and rummaging through Kanaya’s boxes (she nearly has a heart attack there, _do not open those_ ), as the bay doors open to the bright light of Skaia bouncing from glittering golden walls.

 

In the end, they decide to part ways for the day. Jade says she has to find her partner, and Kanaya has a few places to visit that to be honest she’s rather glad Jade won’t be in attendance for.

She stops first at the shops, bartering with friendly but harried carapaces with fabrics and designs. Such superficial business being out of the way, she feels qualified to make her most important stop. It’s the most urgent, too (source of all the rush and worry), but if her contact comes it won’t be until late tonight.

She is distracted on the way over.

The cathedral is high and imposing, near the moon but positioned squarely on a main thoroughfare. The carapaces, used to its presence, don’t glance up at its beauty, but the amount of intricate spires and swirling ancient patterns is enough to make a traveler stand and stare in awe. This is not, however, why Kanaya stops.

She tries, sweep after sweep, to avoid this place, to stop herself from having just one more look at its cavernous insides, the stained-glass patterns dancing on the swirling mosaic floor. As golden as the outside may be, the grand, empty room in the center is made of marble altars and dim rainbow patches of light.

Sweep after sweep, she fails. She enters the room and stands precariously in the center, trying to force a pattern into the abstract window designs for her own sanity, then letting her vision blur over entirely into nostalgia, like rainwater beating against the walls.

There was once an exact replica of this building on Derse.

Though the outside’s color pallet was swapped, the inside was exactly the same. It’s almost like standing there again, altering the woman’s vest, nearly dancing.

She remembers soft blonde hair brushing against the nape of her neck, whispered verbal parries as the rain beats and beats against the stained glass.

 _I’ve always held the opinion that clothing creates strength,_ she said, or maybe it was, _tailors hold power._

Either way the human girl had danced on the edge of dubious, but when they sank against one another it no longer mattered. They held tight, against corruption and imminent enslavement, even though there had been _so much_ they didn’t know about one another. They met in the night, and always left by morning.

Were they dancing, that night when the blast rocked the cathedral’s very foundation and sent it tumbling into the charred brick road? When the Derse police state was established full force, and Kanaya held the rebel’s cold, lifeless hand for the last time? She doesn’t remember.

She stands in the cathedral’s center, turning slow circles. Colored beams of light bathe her face, and small golden motes float and quiver.

So many sweeps have gone by.

Maybe she will never know. Maybe that’s alright.

When she leaves to do what she has to, she doesn’t look back. But she radios Jade to meet her there at the end of the day.

 

Jade is preoccupied. The commissioner has politely informed her that her dreambot is not responding to the emergency long-distance shutdown function. When he asks if she knows where precisely “transport drone number thirty-four” has gone, she feigns complete ignorance.

There is nothing left to do but wait for the dreambot to return, as she knows it wants to, and decide the best course of action from there. Already she’s starting to think of it as a separate entity from herself, instead of an extension of her own consciousness. What else can she call it, if it makes its own decisions and moves without her knowing? The bot has gotten all mixed up with a Derse resistance group, even though it’s kind of a wimp. _Yikes._

Maybe she’s just a weird sleep voyeur, peering in on someone else’s life during her dreams.

The streets of Prospit feel like home nowadays, though she’s always in and out. She smiles when she passes civilians, increasingly few and far between. The days are so short here, and night is falling quickly as Skaia sets behind the gilded horizon.

She had the bot commissioned when John ran off and she needed a new partner. It could perform menial tasks as a drone during the “day,” then she could take it over with her own consciousness as she slept. It wasn’t the same as having a friend onboard, but for awhile she could pretend. Her robotics expert on Earth had assured her that it was a perfect process, formulated not long ago by an Alternian mechanic to perfectly accommodate a living consciousness with zero interference between the two bodies. One hundred percent match. Completely the same.

When she dreamt in her new metal casing she could see her own body, sense the breakable flush of her heart. Sometimes she would touch her flesh hand (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, trace elements) with her robotic one, pick it up and turn it over and over again. So fragile and soft, and her eyes shut so gently against the light. How dangerous that when she squeezed the fingers she could feel no pain.

Eventually, even as she was awake the robot displayed her mannerisms. When it heard small noises it would turn its head like it was genuinely curious.

Could she be blamed for sending it away for awhile? Prospit needs all the hands it can get, and dreambots can be reassigned to other labor. It was just for a little while, until she had steeled her nerves for nights of watching the rise of her own spun-sugar, smashable ribcage.

But now its every action is _so far_ from her own. Maybe her Alternian contact is right about his creations. Maybe 100% isn’t 100% correct.

She meets Kanaya in the cathedral, and though she’s been here before she can’t help but catch her breath at the beauty of the place, the way the criss-crossing stained lights, fired by sunset, play around Kanaya’s body.

“Hi,” she says, and her voice sounds soft and reverent as she moves down the nave.

“Hi,” Kanaya responds, and takes a step forward.

Next thing she knows, Kanaya’s pressed her into a hug, tight and warm and bathed in church lighting. She buries her face in Jade’s shoulder, maneuvering in just the right way to avoid scraping with her horns.

It only takes Jade a second before she hugs back in full force, pouring in all her hopes and fears into something bittersweet and tangible.

They stand like that for what feels like a long time. Jade breathes deeply, tasting the dusty cathedral air and Kanaya’s perfume and the way they intermingle like chemical reaction rocketry in her brain, shooting straight to her sensors, weakening her knees.

Finally Kanaya pulls back, and Jade reluctantly drops her arms. She tires of this in less than a second, instead grasping Kanaya’s hands between them and squeezing at her fingers until she rearranges them to interlace with Jade’s own.

“What have you been up to?” Jade asks, the words bubbling out of her like the baptismal font in the corner.

“Fighting ghosts,” Kanaya responds with a wry twist of the lip.

“Did you win?” Jade runs a thumb over the veins in the back of her hand.

“I believe I did,” Kanaya says, something swift and final in her tone. She holds herself just a bit differently now, charged with something new and illuminated. “I have a lot of things I need to tell you, actually. I realize I haven’t been very receptive to you, and you should know that I would like nothing more in the world than to fully express my affections towards you, because they are incredibly noteworthy, and I’m going to try. All future conflicts of interest notwithstanding, I feel that you deserve to know some things about my rather speckled history and the misadventures, romantic and otherwise, that –”

Jade pushes their mouths together. She gives Kanaya one firm kiss past her first startled squeak, then draws back with a smile.

Kanaya looks like she’s fighting back a smile of her own behind her flushing cheeks.

“Don’t worry,” Jade says. “I’ve got a lot of stuff I’ve been meaning to tell you, too.”

They walk hand in hand down the nave, and they talk.

 

In their hotel room, Kanaya gifts Jade with one of her latest designs for Prospit. It fits almost perfectly, bright and golden against her swaying mess of hair. The suit itself presses tight to her body, and shining hoops descend from her waist, suspended in the shape of a skirt without actual fabric to cover them. She bends back and forth, sending the hoops swinging in the half-light streaming from behind the curtains.

“This is fantastic!” she says with a giggle, doing a sort of jig to watch the rings bounce. Kanaya, not wanting to miss out on the fun, changes into something of her own. A bright vest and shorts, complemented by knee-high stockings and a trailing bustle extending just from the rear. Fashion turns faster than the planets, and it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. Kanaya plops a feathered hat on Jade’s head, pulling it down roughly over one eye and knocking her glasses. Jade squeals and rights them, staring up at her from under Kanaya’s own creation with a joy that would make any tailor’s heart glow.

“So this is what the fashionable elite of Prospit will be wearing next month!” Jade says, performing a few spins.

“You wound me. Next week, at the latest.”

Jade slows and stops, the hoops swaying just behind her. “And on Derse?” she asks. It’s not an accusation, and Kanaya surprises herself by answering honestly.

“Yes. Rather, on Dersian colonies.” She sits on her bed, pulling off the black heels that complimented her knee-highs so well. “Clothes are important to fostering community. Perhaps, if fashionable wear allows them to breathe on distant asteroids and travel across rocky terrain, they will be more willing to move away from the center of power. They could escape the watchful eye of dictatorship and develop revolutionary ideals.”

She holds her breath, waiting for Jade to tell her how silly the idea is.

The captain pulls off the hoop skirt and flops on her back next to her. “I really like,” she says, hand resting across her forehead, eyes green and human (but different, so different), “how you want to start a fashionista revolution.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call it that,” she says in embarrassment, pulling off a stocking.

“No no, it’s super cool how you think of this stuff! You think of the _people,_ you know? And what brings them together. I really hope you know that I think…well, I didn’t know her, but I think Rose would be proud of you.”

Kanaya looks back at her, trying not to breathe. Jade is open and honest, not a trace of fear in her face, and she really is a wonder.

“I would hope so,” Kanaya says. “Smuggling isn’t exactly an ideal way to make a living.”

Jade sits up, hair spilling over the golden embroidery on her chest. She tugs at the top button, holding Kanaya’s gaze uncompromisingly. “This is beautiful, you know.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re beautiful.” She moves in quick bursts of excited motion (never subtle, she) until she is straddling Kanaya’s lap, pressing their foreheads together and digging the rims of her glasses into Kanaya’s eyebrows.

Kanaya breathes deeply, and waits for the “hide” impulse to take root. Any minute now, she will remember that she is a star-crossed, lovelorn smuggler in the midst of a war and she can’t afford this.

It doesn’t come.

Jade is waiting for her to make a decision, and she does; she reaches up to comb her hand through that glorious head of hair, and wraps her other arm snugly around Jade’s waist.

Jade throws her arms over her shoulders and kisses her hard enough to leave her vision bursting with stars.

 

“ – could still make it in the west entrance, if we went fast enough!”

The warehouse base is a mess of activity. Carapaces shoulder large rifles and tuck grenades into their belts while a core group sits on the floor around a large diagram, planning a route to the center of the Dersian armory. Feferi kneels low with the rest of them, talking over any opposition.

“No, listen, we’ve got backup. We place snipers here, and…h _eee_ re! Then we let Aradiabotbot break in through the south whale.”

“What whale?”

“Whale, I mean…oh, wall.”

Jadebot stands with Aradiabot, out of the way in a corner. “Are you really gonna help bust in there?” she asks, scanning her friend’s face.

Aradiabot shrugs. This is more physical reaction than she usually displays; Jadebot is starting to think that she’s been growing more expressive. “I don’t see why I wouldn’t.”

“It just seems kind of dangerous,” she replies, trying to catch another glimpse of Feferi’s expression through the crowd. The troll lady is nice, but very commanding. Sometimes the carapaces seem reluctant to follow her orders, and Jadebot isn’t sure why.

“It is,” Aradiabot says, and then, “There isn’t a very high chance that I’ll make it out again.”

“What?”

“They’re going to use me,” she says, and her oculars are dim and they stare without seeing. “They need my abilities, so they’re going to bleed me dry.”

“No,” Jadebot says, and she grips Aradiabot’s arm very tightly. “They wouldn’t do that to you, they can’t! You’ve been helping them this whole time, you’re one of them!”

“I’m really not,” Aradiabot says. She doesn’t pull her arm away. “When I was alive, I was. Now I’m a machine and I don’t count. Lots of them are going to die in this raid either way, but if I do everything I’m called to, then more of them will live.”

“No.” Jadebot feels her panic centers reacting, the rush of power to her processing systems so that she can try to think this out, try and find a way to make sure everybody is happy and everybody lives. “ No no no, that’s not fair!” She grips Aradiabot’s arm tighter, shaking it back and forth; Aradiabot wobbles on her wheels but does not move. “You don’t have to go. You have a life too, you know!”

“This is what my purpose is,” she says. “It’s my directive.” Now she pulls her arm away, but she swivels to face Jadebot and tilts her head downwards, just so. The angle makes her look sad, and Jadebot feels a growing vibration deep in her chest. “I don’t actually have a life, you know. I died a long time ago.”

 _“No!”_ Jadebot shrieks, and everyone’s staring but she doesn’t care, she’s rocketing into Hero Mode without conscious thought. “You’re alive right _now!_ I won’t let them do this to you, I won’t – ”

 

Jade startles awake with a muffled yell, somehow flinging her pillow to the floor. Kanaya’s hand is pressing against her shoulder before she’s registered where she is.

“It’s just a dream,” Kanaya says, voice curiously hollow in the night air.

“No, it’s really not,” Jade says, grasping the slender fingers and holding them right above her heart. Her breathing begins to regularize, and she throws her head back down against the mattress. “My dreambot, it’s… _she’s_ protecting someone, and every second I’m in her head I feel every emotion like it’s mine. ‘S why it took me so long to accept that she’s a whole different person. Than me, I mean.”

Kanaya gazes down at her with concern, her hair mussed radiantly. Her breastbone is speckled with four light green dots, just left of center. Jade kissed them all quite thoroughly just a few hours ago.

“Is she protecting them from Dersian authorites?” she asks (it feels so good to have someone who _knows_ ), and Jade shakes her head.

“The rebels. They didn’t get a gun shipment from Prospit they needed and now they’re raiding the armory, I guess? And there’s a troll lady in charge except that not everybody thinks she’s in charge, and – are you okay?”

Kanaya’s hand is clenching hers a bit too tightly now, and her face has gone pale.

“This…is a very unfortunate turn of events for your robot,” she says. The words are delicately placed, like dancing around potholes. She draws her hand back carefully. “I hope her situation turns out for the best. On a completely unrelated note, would you mind flying me down to the armory immediately?”

Jade reaches for her glasses and sits up, trying to get a steady view of Kanaya’s face. “The armory? It’s not even dawn yet, why do you –”

“They told me the drone was _late_ when I dropped it all off, I had no idea no one would be _coming,”_ – the tailor has already gotten out of bed and is pulling on her skirt, accidently pushing her foot into the fabric with a shaking urgency – “and of course it’s been so long since the last ship before yours went from Alternia to Prospit that I would have been too late regardless, but I wish we hadn’t spent so much time –”

“Kanaya, tell me what’s going on!”

She doesn’t answer immediately. Instead comprehension dawns as Jade watches her struggle with her second boot.

“I thought you wanted to start a revolution by smuggling _fashion!”_ she says.

“Yes, that is absolutely true,” Kanaya replies helplessly as she pulls on one of her gold-sheen jackets. “But the guns help.”

 

“ – my god oh my god, you have to be okay, please be okay.”

“Circuitry is completely smashed through the left side, and there’s heavy damage to the optics, who knows what else is wrong in her processor, I can’t –”

“You have to fix her! You have to make her better.”

“I can’t. I don’t know enough about robotics and her seams are practically welded shut, fucking shit – ”

 _“Please!”_ she says, and she grabs the troll’s arm hard enough to make him gasp sharply through the mess of emotions on his normally placid face.

He stares down at the twisted metal arm on his lap with something like horror, dirty yellow blood oozing from somewhere above his own hairline. “She’s fucking dead,” he says, and Jadebot shouts something unintelligible and grips even _tighter,_ knowing that this is wrong because she’s stronger than Real People and she shouldn’t ever use that to hurt them, but her friend is lying on the warehouse floor with wires reaching from her chest like writhing monstrosities and half of her face covered in the black char that comes with explosions, one red eye blown out entirely.

“I can _hear her_ ,” she says, and focuses on the dot-dot-hold, dot-dot-hold of Aradiabot’s radio waves. “She’s trapped in there!”

“She’s dead,” Sollux says, but it sounds like he’s talking to himself more than her, and he reaches for a wrench. He moves clumsily, his back hunched oddly over the body like he’s in mourning and she can’t see his eyes through the glare of his lenses.

The warehouse dances on the edge of chaos, a mess of carapaces being hauled across the floor on stretchers and the desperate, too-loud whispers of the guards trying to find just another round of ammo as the results of the raid are catalogued and rapidly depleted again. There is no sound of shots being fired, for now. There is no way to know if the government has traced back their trail of violent destruction to its genesis in a lonely, condemned building down the road from the old cathedral site. It would be so easy, with the havoc they wreaked. From what she hears they went in with a bang and out with a whimper. They took what they could under the lights of Aradiabot’s laser fire as she barreled through the guards, smashing them against walls and through floors, vicious and merciless and completely vulnerable from every side.

“This will have saved us,” she hears Feferi saying as she paces past them towards the makeshift stockpile, “We needed to–”

“But there are so many _hurting_ now,” a soft voice answers her, deep and wretched with sympathy, and Jadebot looks up to see a small carapace man by her side. He wears simple garb – a shepherd, maybe, or a farmer – but a sash around his shoulder marks him as something unusual in her sensors. “I didn’t want this to happen. You shouldn’t have gone.”

Feferi shakes her head, sad and frantic and not quite ever looking at the sprawl of dark bodies around her. “Even more would have died otherwise! Sometimes you have to be brave and make tough decisions to do what’s best for the group, you should know that by now!”

“I don’t want any more people to die,” he says, a strand of iron running deep under his fragile little voice, and Feferi’s expression wavers, caught somewhere between pity and resignation.

“We have different ideas of what a revolution needs,” she says gently.

He doesn’t respond, instead turning to face the makeshift repairs in progress.

“Is she okay?” he asks Sollux. His eyes are big and white and Jadebot grabs his wrist. He jerks back with surprise but doesn’t pull too hard, meeting her eyes with more bravery than a lot of people.

“You have to make him fix her,” she says, and tilts her head sideways in a way she knows Real People register as pleading and helpless. “She’s not dead, she just can’t move.”

Sollux doesn’t look up. He fiddles with the wiring with shaking hands.

“Is that true?” the carapace asks him. “If you can save her –”

“I didn’t mean the _robot_ was dead, morons,” he says, and there is absolutely no bite behind the words. “I just…give me some time to put a band-aid on this clusterfuck.”

Feferi stands behind him, lightly touching his neck. As he works she runs her fingers through his hairline, soft in the midst of dying sounds.

“She’s going to be okay,” Jadebot tells them all as she grabs Aradiabot’s undamaged hand.

 _Dot-dot-hold, dot-dot-_

 

“They went through with the raid,” Jade tells Kanaya when she wakes (she only sleeps once, this shorter journey), and she looks so sad for this array of people she’s never met that Kanaya’s chest throbs until she’s kissed the folds of her eyelids and the creases where her smile lines should be.

 

“ – all had to hold me back because I went into Hero Mode on accident, and then you left and when you came back you were sprawled out just everywhere and I could barely look –”

“You’re going to damage my torso,” Aradiabot says (too softly, still, like someone’s turned her volume way down) and Jadebot lets go, letting her friend’s body flatten against the floor (they had needed the tables for the sheer quantity of the injured). The wires no longer reach from under her chassis like some kind of demon sea, and the missing chunks of her face have been at least covered with some thin sheeting. One eye is still clean gone, only a black spot like demolition in its place, and her arm is hopelessly mangled, shining at odd angles in the light of the night sky through ceiling cracks. They are alone, apart from the steady steps of lookouts outside the walls.

“I’m so sorry, I’m just so glad you’re alive!” Jadebot is telling the truth, one hundred percent. She’s just getting a bit nervous with the way she’s being stared at, and when Aradiabot gives her a full scan again, like the first time they met, she doesn’t know what to make of it. The two of them are quiet for a moment until Jadebot reaches for her hand; it’s jerked back in a hurry.

“Stop saying that,” Aradiabot says, about a minute late, and Jadebot finds it harder to move all over again. She shouldn’t have mistaken softness for anything but a feature of the airwaves carrying the sound.

“But –”

“Just _stop_ ,” she says, and Jadebot knows there’s no way she’s imagining the heavy inflection now. “There was absolutely no point to reviving me. I can’t move without difficulty, one of my oculars has been neutralized, and my balance functions are completely destroyed. I am out of fuel. It’s likely my thrusters are dysfunctional.” The words come sharper and louder, like turning the knob up on a stereo. She is deathly still, pressed to the dirty warehouse floor. “One of my blasters is lying in the dank heart of the armory. The reduction of vocabulary storage space is probably irreversible. I can no longer differentiate between species of flora, and I’m unable to process the color orange.” She picks up speed now, and Jadebot feels it humming through her with the radio waves.

“That’s not –”

“My long-term storage drive is exhibiting signs of damage. Likely it will disintegrate to the point where I’ll be unable to recognize faces. My data files are hopelessly corrupted.” She’s shaking now, her entire chassis clattering against the ground. Her calm voice is too loud. “I am consistently emitting white noise. My spinal cord has been snapped nearly in two. There’s something wrong with my damage report function because it’s all I can see playing over my sensors, over and over again, next to your personal data and the way your numbers never fit anywhere when mine are so – I can’t – ” The tremors seem violent enough to attract attention as she convulses, so Jadebot presses her back by her shoulders, searching her files desperately for something to say.

Aradiabot emits a cluster of jumbled noises that culminates in a squeal, then suddenly she bites, “It isn’t fair. Scanning. Define directive.”

 _“No!”_ Jadebot gasps, and pulls Aradiabot just enough off the ground that she can shove her back down again. “Don’t do that, you can’t do that! Who cares, anyway? Who cares if you’re not meeting your directive, how are you supposed to do that all the time? How is _anyone?_ Aradiabot, stop!”

“My name is Aradia,” she says, cold and as lifeless as when they first met and Jadebot would cry if she could.

“No,” she says like sobbing, “No, it’s not. I’m sorry, but you’re as much Aradia as I am Jade, which is not really much at all.” She presses her hand to her friend’s forehead, praying she hasn’t initiated the scan. “Listen to me very closely, you’re not the same as her. She died, and everybody knows she died and everybody’s sad about it, but you don’t have to be her for them, you know? You get to be a real person all your own. We all get to be Real People.”

Silence catches them both. Voices mutter outside, but they are a world away.

“It isn’t fair,” Aradiabot says, and it comes out like a sigh. Then louder, “It isn’t _fair!_ ”

“I know,” Jadebot says, and she doesn’t really know what they’re talking about anymore, but she lowers her head onto Aradiabot’s chest and lays there for a long time.


	4. Chapter 4

When the door creaks open again, it’s nearly dawn.

The lookout shows her in after a bit of argument, and even from her spot with her head down Jadebot can tell who it is based on the pattern of her shadow.

Real Jade – human Jade, maybe that’s better – moves silently across the floor until she’s squatting with her, across from Aradiabot’s body. She’s bright and pink and warm as Jadebot always remembered, and when she grabs Aradiabot’s hand in her human one the juxtaposition is striking in some ways and not at all in others. Jadebot could sing, because Jade is strong and competent and just what everybody needs, probably.

“I brought some tools,” she murmurs, glancing cautiously towards the door. “I can do a little bit here, but we need to get her back to a real mechanic.”

Jadebot nods vigorously until her neck plates scrape. “Maybe that big man on Alternia can do it,” she says, and then repeats it in a whisper after Jade shushes her.

For a few minutes Jade works in silence, tweaking parts that Sollux didn’t have practical expertise in. Then she looks up, moonlight dusting her human features, and with a slight smile she whispers, “Hi, by the way!” and Jadebot giggles with the sheer weirdness of it all.

They wait there, and Aradiabot keeps quiet (she seems so reluctant to talk to people who are not Jadebot). Jade is a quick and efficient worker, trained by necessity and the inner workings of her own ship.

Eventually other people start moving, hauling in bulky, oddly colorful boxes towards the arms stockpile. They swarm around each pink hatbox and each container decorated by demure green bows, buzzing excitedly about advanced Alternian weaponry and what they’ve all been waiting for and _hope, maybe hope, maybe._

A very pretty troll lady directs these proceedings, and sometimes she and Jade catch each other’s eyes and smile in a very secret, very tired, very glad way.

“Do you want to come with me?” Jade asks, after they’ve gotten Aradiabot upright and moving towards her ship, which is not exactly hidden well enough to stay for long. Jade tells her that Earth is politically neutral, so getting into the planet wasn’t impossible, but moving all of the “dresses” from the storage bay is harder.

“I think I do!” she says, suddenly a little bit happier than she was a few moments ago. “As long as Aradiabot is coming with us.” The robot is wheeling away through the back exit (it can’t hurt to be too cautious), arm still hanging in decimation, but closer to safety than she’s been in a long time.

“For a little while at least, yep,” Jade responds with a big grin. Jadebot likes it when Jade grins, it’s so toothy and bright and calm. “So you wanna be my pilot again?”

“Yessir!”

“Good! Haha, I think we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. I’m…sorry I left you alone for so long! I didn’t –”

Jadebot reaches out to touch her on the shoulder, and she jumps slightly at the contact. Maybe the metal is cold.

Jade stares her straight in the oculars, through into the machinery and the mind, and then her smile comes back full force. “Anyway, let’s see if they need our help unpacking any more stuff.”

They don’t ever get to see, because then a sudden blast rocks the foundations of the warehouse and sends Jade tumbling off her feet.

Jadebot panics, flying up towards the roof before realizing that isn’t any safer and instead heading to the door; she nearly collides headfirst with Feferi as she stumbles inside, shouting commands like a queen.

Jade and Kanaya have their weapons drawn, and they move towards the door like they’re ready for a fight, so Jadebot stays away from the door too. Suddenly the small carapace man, appearing from nowhere, is standing in front of Kanaya, arms spread.

“You have to go!” he says, and Kanaya tries to move around him to get a good shot at whatever’s going on outside. Jadebot hears laser fire and sees flashes of light through the cracks in the walls. “Listen to me!” he says, small voice rising. “If you don’t leave, we’ll lose our contact with Alternia. We need you to _go,_ before they close the borders!”

“But –”

“We can handle this!” Feferi shouts, her back to the wall next to the doorframe. “We’ve got everything we need now, so we need you to get the shell out of here! Use the cellar exit!” She dives around the corner, firing rapidly.

Kanaya looks pained. Her trigger finger traces the lines of her gun as she takes another forward step.

“Let’s go,” Jade says suddenly, grabbing her by the arm and spinning her in the other direction, and then she comes willingly enough. Jadebot follows, leaving her corner only when she’s certain no one can hit her with stray laser fire from this angle. War is scary scary _scary,_ and it’s all she can do to keep her sensors out of the emergency self-preservation setting (“self-” being the key; she does not want to accidentally hurt the blood-and-bone people in this cramped little space).

Jade dives first down the derelict cellar passage, and Kanaya tries to follow – with a flash, some heavy form of fire blasts a gaping hole in the wall and she goes flying over her target, slamming against the ground and showered with purple-painted wood. Jadebot gasps, halfway to safety, and flies to grab her, wrapping her arms under hers and pulling her down the hole. When she drops her on the floor, at first Kanaya’s legs give out beneath her; Jade catches her and holds her upright until she’s found a sort of balance favoring her right leg.

“I’m fine,” she gasps. “Keep moving.”

“They’ll be okay,” Jade says as runs to brace herself against a shelf full of dusty bottles, pushing hard. It sounds like a question, and she catches Kanaya’s eyes imploringly.

“Yes. I know these people. They’ll be fine.”

The shelf moves until they can see a triangular crevice in the wall, just big enough to fit Kanaya stooping. They duck inside, one after the other, and Jadebot turns on her high beams. It’s dark and dank and claustrophobic, and every now and then Kanaya stumbles a little bit as she moves, but Jadebot can see the way Jade clutches her hand from in front of her and she’s pretty sure she’s going to be alright.

 

They pile into the cockpit, and Jade immediately starts thrusting everything into gear. Sensors that Kanaya doesn’t understand ping frantically, registering bright red dots moving in careful patterns across their screens.

“They’ve mobilizing a border guard,” Jade says, and curses loudly. The viewport flickers to life and Kanaya watches a purple drone streak across the morning sky. She allows the restraints to snake around her body at the same time as the thrusters roar to life beneath them, thrumming through her body like they did three and a half weeks ago at the beginning of this swooping, exhausting, exhilarating trip.

“We’ll have a window,” Jade shouts over the engines, focused entirely on the monitors. “It’ll be quick, and once we’re off the ground we can’t stop until we’re out of orbit.”

Kanaya nods. “I trust you,” she says as loudly as she dares.

“Three, two –”

Jadebot’s head suddenly swivels on its neck joint. “Did Aradiabot make it? Is she here?”

Before she’s even finished, the ship is rising off the ground with a lurch that sends Kanaya’s stomach to her knees (she’ll never get over that initial feeling of flight), and they’re rising past the curious silver trees as fast as the ship will take them, like barreling towards a glass ceiling at smashing speed.

“Where is she?” Jadebot yells, her amplifiers carrying her voice unnaturally over the sounds of liftoff. “She needs to be here, I won’t leave without – oh!”

Kanaya follows her gaze to the rear monitors. They watch Aradiabot rise above the trees behind them, rockets carrying her as fast as she can go. She is moving more smoothly than Kanaya would have thought possible, only her mangled arm flopping unnaturally against her side. It’s hard to tell from this angle, but part of her skirt may be newly smashed in.

“She’s gaining,” Jadebot says in awe.

“Fuck!” Jade yells, and throws a lever. Jadebot tries to leave the cockpit, but the weight of ascension makes even her movement sluggish. “Just wait a minute!” Jade yells, barely audible above the rush, and grits her teeth. She’s maneuvering the control panel in patterns Kanaya has never seen before, searching for every burst of speed she can find. She is positive she can feel the ship shuddering to pieces beneath them as they race against time and the small, blinking dot of a drone coming in from the west.

And Aradiabot continues to climb below them, little pieces of metal dropping off behind her.

Kanaya shuts her eyes tight as they rise to the patrol’s level, only praying that the drone isn’t close enough to detect them –

And then they’ve broken free, into atmosphere so thin it’s outer space already. Jade lets out a wild whoop and shifts some sort of gear, and with an undignified lurch the ship is moving forward and away again, their breath seizing in the sudden dearth of sound from the change in thrust.

“Oh my god,” Kanaya says, and presses her head back into the seat.

“Yeah,” Jade responds with the biggest grin she has ever seen.

Kanaya starts laughing first, ugly, whooping guffaws that she can’t be bothered to school into something a bit more dignified, hunched over herself in her chair as she clutches at her stomach. Then Jade is joining her, tearing her eyes from the viewport to match their gazes for a moment, her barking laughter like some sort of ridiculous angel chorus in the pseudo-nighttime that presses down at them from the viewport. They sit there and laugh for a moment, drinking in each other’s faces, as the ship speeds away from the dark planet along the border of the Veil.

“Go with Jadebot,” the captain says next, and Kanaya notices that their third companion has already left the pit. The seat releases her and she swings herself up into the dark hallway, limping her way to the airlock. Jadebot is pressing herself against the thick door between the interior of the ship and the small antechamber where Jade had showed Kanaya, weeks ago, how to step seamlessly out of the ship and into a void. The airlock chamber is cramped and square, visible through a small window of reinforced glass.

“She’ll reach us any minute,” Jadebot says excitedly, and presses her metal face against the screen.

Sure enough, a green light flares to life at the side of the door, and Jadebot punches a code into the keypad so frantically that she has to redo it twice.

They watch the outer door slide open. Aradiabot’s head is lolling strangely as she pushes against the ship’s own forward momentum to rocket into the chamber. As the door closes behind her Jadebot tries to open her side immediately, slamming her thumb into the button again and again. Finally, when the air pressure has equalized, the door obeys her, and instead of waiting for her friend to step out Jadebot jets into the chamber and tackles her with a hug.

“Careful,” Aradiabot says. Kanaya can see that one of her metallic horns is dangling off the side of her head.

“We’re going to be _okay!”_ Jadebot says, exhilarated, and pulls back to see her friend’s face. Kanaya is struck by the similar body language to Jade (if she had had more time to think and process back on Derse, she might have found it strange sooner), but at the same time the energy is not quite the same. She moves frantically and without logic, and when Aradiabot responds with a cautious nod she grabs her by the shoulders and spins them around in a sort of happy midair dance, suspended by rocketry, disregarding the way she’s almost certainly making Aradiabot’s state worse.

“If you’d like to step out here – ” Kanaya tries, but Aradiabot interrupts.

“I’d like to stay with you,” she says, suddenly and firmly. Jadebot stops instantly with a sound resembling a gasp. She continues: “I don’t know why you run the way you do; it could be a glitch in your system somewhere or just a result of some bizarre whim of your programmer. Whatever it is, it makes you act like you’re really alive.” She tilts her head, just so, and suddenly Kanaya feels that she’s intruding on a very special moment. She tries stepping back further, but there isn’t a lot of hallway for her to cover this way.

Aradiabot hovers lower, bringing Jadebot down with her. “And what’s weirder, you act like everyone around you is really alive, too.”

Jadebot doesn’t seem to have a response for that, so she reaches out to pat Aradiabot’s head.

“I don’t know if I am alive,” Aradiabot says, and Kanaya listens harder despite herself. “But I want to see what you think about it.”

Jadebot pulls the two of them back up near the top of the chamber, heads above the doorframe out of view; Aradiabot’s rockets are stuttering now, pushed to their limits.

Suddenly Kanaya is thrown against the wall as the entire ships shudders, rocked by a blast from the outside. The red warning lights begin to flash as an alarm wails; the airlock slams shut with the robots inside.

Kanaya struggles to stand, head throbbing; she can just barely see the outer door sliding open through the small window and a flash of chrome and gold before she’s thrown again, down the hall this time. Then Jade is there, pulling her roughly to her feet.

“They’ve found us,” she says, loud and brave. “Get Jadebot to pilot the ship.” Then she’s taking off down the hallway, sprinting towards the gun deck with loose hair flying out behind her like a cape.

“Wait!” Kanaya yells, and Jade skids to a stop. “She’s gone!”

The airlock chamber is empty now, the door closed firmly against the stars.

“Then you pilot us!” Jade shouts back, turning to run again as the ship gives another light shudder.

“I can’t, I don’t know how!”

“I think we’ve established,” Jade’s voice bounces down the red flashing passageway, “that no one here knows how to fly the ship!”

Kanaya swallows, hard, and presses a hand to the wall. She stares down at where Jade’s head has disappeared to the lower level deck, and decides that the captain is absolutely right on this point. She takes off to the cockpit, stumbling on her injured leg as the ship is hit with another barrage. By the time she’s thrown herself into the pilot’s chair, the rear monitor shows that Jade is sitting snugly at the laser turret, gripping her joysticks until her knuckles are white. She rapid-fires at the advancing ships (scouts, all of them, more compact than their own), slowly swiveling in the chair to attack from all sides. The point ship takes heavy damage to the left flank and peels away, leaving only a whole lot more.

“ –need to lose them in the Veil,” she hears Jade over the intercom, fuzzy and distorted by laser fire. Another wing of a ship is ripped off at its weakest point, sparking, and their pursuer goes down. Jade may not be a pilot, but she is a ridiculously good shot with the turret.

Kanaya pulls against a lever she often sees Jade using, and the ship lurches. She quickly pushes it back.

“I hope you’re aware,” she says, voice rising in the wake of pressure, “that we’re in some terrifically deep shit.”

Jade doesn’t answer for a second, focusing on her targets. Then, “To port! Left!”

Kanaya pulls hard against something she’s fairly certain is related to direction, and the ship _spirals,_ tipping them into a barrel roll. They avoid most of the fire this way, but it takes another minute for Kanaya to regain her sense of direction and make sure they’re facing directly towards the Veil.

“Oh my _god,_ ” she says, and she thinks she can hear Jade laughing through the intercom.

There are just so many of them; Kanaya isn’t sure how to work the various sensors but she’s pretty certain that the sea of red dots slowly encroaching on their central white spot is a bad sign. She can see the Veil perfectly from here, but distance is distorted without a horizon.

A burst of red firepower explodes from somewhere above them – its roaring would be thunderous had there been air to carry the sound – and the next leading ship is engulfed.

 

 _You can’t do this!_ Jadebot shoots through the radio band, willing her friend to stop and turn around so they can duck back into the ship together and hide until everything is over. _There are so many of them, and you’re hurt!_

Aradiabot keeps pace with the ship, firing the biggest lasers she has left, and Jadebot realizes that she had _no idea_ what kind of damage this resistance-born machine is capable of. She takes time between each blast of her remaining ocular, transferring all energy into one specific point and doling it out to devastating effect, searing the pursuers’ ships in combination with Jade’s turret shots and the _guns that have popped out of her shoulders_ oh god. Aradiabot is a weapon, deadly and accurate and so, so injured.

 _Stop,_ she pleads.

Aradiabot responds, with perfect clarity, _I need to do this._

 _No, you don’t!_ Jadebot signals, pressing close under their ship’s wing, trying to stay out of firing range. _You’re your own person, remember? You’re not just some tool for them to use to –_

 _I know,_ she says, and the words buzz with an energy Jadebot has never sensed from her before. _I’m doing this because I want to protect you._

They speed through space backwards and suspended in eerie silence, Aradiabot moving slow circles around enemy fire. Jadebot doesn’t understand how she can keep fighting, no matter how hurt she is, and she remembers a chrome body entirely out of place in the midst of Prospit gold, straining for the armory even as she fell to the ground.

Aradiabot takes a blast to the shoulder, and suddenly she’s tumbling back with the propulsion, turning lopsided spins over their ship’s top. Jadebot feels her core surging to life, and without a thought she’s in Hero Mode, blasting to catch her before she tumbles too far, letting Aradiabot’s body slam against her own.

The decimated arm finally snaps away, spinning into darkness.

 _Are you alright?_ she asks, but Aradiabot is already fighting again, a strange roar on her normally placid face that reveals what looks like hundreds of sharp metal teeth. She blasts their pursuers, again and again, taking down entire ships on her own. She is so hurt.

It isn’t fair, Jadebot realizes. It isn’t fair to let Aradiabot fight for her while she hovers here, just keeping pace, stiff and afraid and _war is so scary._

Hero Mode makes the power sizzle through her channels like the meaning of life.

Then she’s roaring too, in her head and through the radio waves, a battle cry trapped between a void and their own furious, frantically processing, circuiting, _living_ minds.

She fires, again and again. Her lasers are not as strong as Aradiabot’s, but they cut across ships in just the right places because she’s lived on one and skipped in and out of the mainframe and she knows how to fight them. She knows how to fight.

When they pass the first asteroids of the Veil, they are side by side, _roaring._

 

Kanaya cannot fly a spaceship. This is abundantly apparent. She smashes against small asteroids, spinning almost out of control.

“Almost home free!” says Jade’s fuzzy intercom voice. “You can do it!”

“Do _what?_ ” she shouts back, taking in the viewport full of very dangerous-looking space rocks surrounding them, constantly peppered by laser fire. Kanaya Maryam is not a being prone to panic, but even at her most collected she wouldn’t be able to keep this up for long. Though sometimes a pursuing ship will go down in a blaze of silent fire, they’re gaining. Various alarms are blinking red all over the cockpit, and Kanaya is positive that every single one of them means something very bad for the state of the ship.

They graze against yet another asteroid, narrowly avoiding actual collision, and spin off course. She doesn’t even know where they are anymore, and suddenly she’s at a right angle with the pursuers. She can see them straight out the viewport as they approach at what feels like ramming speed; she pictures Jade’s face and wonders if she will ever see it again, or if her last memories will be of her voice rising from some nondescript speaker as they fall, glorious blazing wreckage dragging them down to die on an alien landscape –

A barrage of laser fire assaults their enemies from behind. They break formation in confusion, scattering amidst the rocks for some kind of cover.

As a particularly large asteroid drifts upwards out of her vision, Kanaya can make out a small army of Dersians, dressed in low-atmosphere garb that she recognizes, standing on what looks like a fortress wall.

They fire on their pursuers, driving them to complete chaos as they move to escape the ambush; then the entire hidden population of another asteroid colony opens fire. She sees a flag waving on the ramparts, white streaked with lavender. Whatever it is, it is _not_ a flag of Derse. As the _Space Crevice_ jets past them, suddenly unmolested, Kanaya imagines she sees a sea of raised hands waving her on.

Now is not the time. She cannot afford this.

(She thinks she feels tears in her eyes.)

The _Crevice_ speeds away, limping along like playing hide-and-seek with Armageddon. Gradually she slows it down, so as to better maneuver around the rocks. No one comes, and Kanaya is free to let ragged breaths burst through her body, driven by a muddled mess of emotions she doesn't have the time to sort.

Utter silence surrounds them, and Jade and the robots have stopped firing. She can hardly believe that it’s over, but the sensors are clear; the red dots drift slowly further away until finally they are alone, a single white light in the middle of the screen.

Kanaya breathes very deeply and drops her head to the controls, not even caring as the metal smacks painfully against her forehead.

Maybe today, as little as she can afford it, is an excellent day.

She jumps when a minute later a hand touches her shoulder. Jade giggles a bit breathlessly.

“Hey!” she says, and plops into the co-pilot’s chair. She is flushed from the heat of battle, bangs sticking to her forehead and eyes bright with exertion behind her dirty glasses. It’s likely that she’s never looked more beautiful.

“Hi,” Kanaya responds. “That wasn’t very polite.”

“What, leaving you with the controls?”

“Well it’s not like there’s any way that decision _wouldn’t_ end in absolute, bitter failure. Do you have any _idea_ how many asteroids I’ve grazed in the past five minutes?”

“Six,” Jade says cheerfully, and pulls her into a deep kiss.

They are sweaty and exhausted, and when Kanaya clutches Jade’s wrist she can feel the aftermath of the adrenaline rush shaking through her veins. Then their hands move on their own accord, almost, and Kanaya sees absolutely nothing wrong with Jade’s decision to hoist herself onto Kanaya’s lap, pushing her back against the headrest with the force of her kiss, pinning her wrists back over her head so that her fingers drape over the chair top, arching her spine.

“You weren’t _that_ bad,” Jade murmurs, lifting her lips just barely; the words vibrate against Kanaya’s own skin and she answers with a low hum, moving slowly underneath Jade’s hips.

“And you were a good shot,” she manages to reply before pulling away to kiss the spot between ear and neck, lips open against Jade’s pulse.

“We should do this for…a living,” Jade says, voice tilting low and breathy by the end. Kanaya squirms, pressing the two of them closer together, bodies and warmth and they are still alive.

Then the ship grazes an asteroid, flinging Jade’s chin against Kanaya’s head before she falls off the chair entirely.

“Okay, _oww._ ”

Then it’s all she can do not to laugh.

 

It’s a long trip back to Alternia, even excluding any stops at Prospit for repairs, which are looking less likely as they move further out through the Veil.

“So I can finally say I’ve had the privilege of traveling in a ship that’s probably going to be appearing in Dersian files marked as ‘hostile’ for years to come. I’m honestly overwhelmed.” Kanaya takes a sip of tea, hot and mellow against her dry throat. Jade added honey this time.

“You can’t say it wasn’t exciting, though,” Jade says, leaning her elbow against their little fold-out table, and Kanaya has to agree.

Jadebot is an infinitely better pilot than Jade, and everyone is pretty relived when she returns to take the helm. Now she and Aradiabot stay in the cockpit. The way they stand so close together feels infinitely significant to Kanaya, and as they left to make their tea, she saw the two of them lean in to rest their foreheads together; half of Aradiabot’s face is blown clean away and she still looks calm like that.

She brushes her knees against Jade’s under the table, and Jade hooks her foot around Kanaya’s (uninjured) ankle.

“So...I suppose you’ll be dropping me off when we get to Alternia,” Kanaya begins. She watches Jade’s face closely, but by this time all of that lonely worry has dissolved completely.

“ERRRR! Wrong!” The captain sets her own cup down firmly, sloshing some tea over the edges. The gravity seems to work just fine. “You’re going to stay on with Jadebot and me!”

“Oh?” Kanaya says, even as she feels a rush of warmth spreading from her ribcage and directly behind her eyes. “And what if I were to say no? I have a business to maintain.”

Jade shrugs. “Do it out here, you’ve managed so far. We’ll figure it out. All I know is that I want you to be here, and you want to be here, so you should stay.”

“Simple as that?” Kanaya asks, hands wrapped gently around her tea. Jade cups her trollish grey hands with her pink human ones.

“Simple as that,” she says.

Jade Harley has a smile like adventure incarnate. She is stronger than a thousand hoofbeasts and more shocking than a kick in the teeth. But when she leans in to plant a kiss on the corner of Kanaya’s mouth, all that matters is that she makes fantastic honeyed tea.

 

“I’m not sure where to go from here,” Aradiabot admits. She sits, half-propped, in the copilot’s chair, watching as Jadebot maneuvers carefully between asteroids.

“I dunno either, actually,” Jadebot says with a giggle. “I guess I’ll help Jade for awhile, and then who knows? We don’t really…need a directive, I think.”

Aradiabot gives her another one of her quiet stares, then faces the viewport. The stars are bright between the rocks, and the ship pushes through inky blackness like it’s nothing more than space.

“We might be unique,” she says finally. “New specimens of a new species.”

“We might be able to convince the mechanic to give us a new paintjob, if we’re nice enough.”

Aradiabot laughs. It’s a quiet, unsure sound, synthesized from the prerecorded clips of someone else’s voice, but it’s real and it makes Jadebot lighter inside. She reaches to put her hand over Aradiabot’s, and clutches her fingers tightly.

“I guess we’ll find out soon,” Aradiabot says, and Jadebot doesn’t ask her to clarify which thing she’s talking about.

The ship leaves the Skaia system as a tiny dot against a lonely, infinite sky.

Inside, the air is warm.


End file.
